A weird-looking parasitic plant has discarded all its photosynthesis machinery – and nevertheless has found a way to thrive.

“My long-standing aim is to rethink what it truly means to be a plant,” Kenji Suetsugu, a botanist at Kobe University in ...

Balanophora is a plant that abandoned photosynthesis long ago and now lives entirely as a parasite on tree roots, hidden in ...

A dodder plant begins its life looking like a tapeworm. The tiny plant, which will never grow leaves or roots, elongates in a spindly spiral. Round and round it swirls, searching for a host plant.

Parasitic plants are notorious agricultural pests that drain nutrients from crops and cause economic losses of more than USD ...

Parasitic plants do not haphazardly flail about looking for a host but sense volatile chemicals produced by other plants and identify potential hosts by their emissions, according to a team of Penn ...

Jim Westwood, professor of plant pathology, physiology, and weed science, examines dodder, a parasitic plant with a covert weaponry system. Research at Virginia Tech and Penn State that has revealed ...

A new study has uncovered the complex genetic interaction between root-knot nematodes and tomato plants, revealing how these microscopic parasites manipulate plant genomes to induce gall formation. By ...